Saturday, May 12, 2018

Love and Joy.

John 15:8-17
May 6, 2018

I.


The Christian life is about love and joy.  

That is something we often forget.  The church grows and thrives because people are attracted by the love and the joy we share among us and with the world.  People see the love and the joy, and they want to be a part of it.  The church contracts and implodes when we don’t express and reflect love and joy.  

Unfortunately, love and joy are not things for which Christians, Presbyterians in particular, are known.  That’s not what pollsters discover when they ask what people think about Christians and Christianity.  They don’t say, “Oh yeah, those people are definitely all about love and joy.”  It’s more the opposite.  Christians are more known for who they hate, these days.  We’re known for resentment, hypocrisy, closed-mindedness, and judgmentalism….  

That’s because for too long and for too many of us, Christianity was not about love and joy, and certainly not about Jesus, but about other things.  It was about nostalgia for a largely imaginary past, when everything was supposedly better; a time when we had status, privilege, clout, and money.  And it was all wrapped in Christian-sounding language.  Now that that isn’t happening so much, some are really angry about it.   

Jesus doesn’t care about any of that.  He rejects that kind of status, privilege, and power when the devil offers it to him.  He says: “Sorry, no.  What I am about, what glorifies my Father is not your throwing his Name around to justify your self-righteous, paranoid violence.  It’s love and joy.”  Unless we have a reputation for love and joy, people are not likely to show up here.  Who wants to waste a perfectly good Sunday morning being hateful, mad, and sad?     

Jesus says that we abide in his love when we keep his commandments.  That is, when our way of life, our behavior, our words and actions, is shaped by what Jesus does and teaches, we participate in his love.  And his love is also God’s love, for the whole world.  To share in this love is to find joy.  This is what Jesus means by “bearing fruit.”  It is when we act in the world according to Jesus’ example and commandments.

The gospel of John, unlike the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, doesn’t actually have a set list of Jesus’ commandments in one place.  I suspect that John knows that, when presented with written commandments, people always find ways around them.  So in this gospel, Jesus has basically one big commandment that is supposed to cover everything:  “Love one another as I have loved you.”

And, in case that is a bit too general, the Lord follows it up with a clarifying statement.  “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  So Jesus shows his love for us by laying down his life for us, his friends, who do what he commands.  This is summed up in one, general commandment to love as he loves us, by also laying down our lives.  He is calling us basically to die for each other, as he dies for us.  Not be willing to do it.  Not to affirm it verbally.  But to do it.  To lay down our lives for him and for each other.  

II.

Now, laying down our lives is sometimes in extreme circumstances of persecution or war literally demanded of Jesus’ followers.  Christian history is populated by many martyrs called upon to suffer and die for the truth.  This still happens even today in parts of the world.  

But, just because we are not in those places or situations does not mean we are off the hook.  Jesus commands all of us to love one another as he loves us, which means laying down our lives for each other.  We need to set aside the ego-centric, small, false selves we think we are, in order to emerge into the vast, blessed, good, true Selves we are in him.  And that is where the love finally blossoms into joy.

In order to love one another as Jesus loves us, nothing less than our death, in the sense of letting go of everything that has come to define us and everything that we have come to rely on, is needed.  It symbolically happens in the Sacrament of Baptism in which we figuratively and ritually “die” with Jesus.  And it happens in the ongoing work of repentance, in which we come to see and think differently about ourselves and our world, and thus act differently.  

Rather than living out of ourselves and our own reason, self-image, memories, and feelings, we, because we are connected to him like a branch to a vine, come to live according to his energy and life.  We “bear fruit,” as Jesus says, according to his living Presence in us.  We obey his commandments and thus become his friends, his agents, his disciples, his apostles, and his representatives in the world.  He lays down his life for us, his friends, in order that his life may become ours.

It is essential that we remember that this is not something we simply do as private, isolated individuals.  Jesus says that love is not just laying down one’s life, it is laying down one’s life for one’s friends.  Laying down our selfish, ego-centric existence is something necessarily done as an act of love and obedience to him and therefore for others.  We cannot do this because of what we will personally or individually get out of it.  We cannot do it on our own initiative at all.

Laying down our life means laying down our false sense of independence and separateness from each other.  It means laying down, as in relinquishing and letting go of, our seeing others as adversaries or competitors, let alone as enemies.  It means identifying with them until they really aren’t even others anymore, but people whose pain, loss, weakness, and hunger we feel ourselves.  It is something we can only do in Christ, after his example.

Jesus loves us by emptying himself over us, giving himself to us, laying down his life for us, feeding us with his own body and blood, calling us up out of our own tombs, and declaring us his friends.  We participate in his friendship when that same life that animates him begins to flow through us, as shown in the way we keep his commandments.  That is, we are his friends when we in his name befriend the world over which he gives his life.

III.

“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you;” “as I have loved you,”
“love one another.”  Jesus is doing nothing less than inviting us into his relationship with the Father and with the world.  This is what we have been chosen for, to abide in his love.  His love is not a static thing we possess or even pass around among ourselves.  His love is alive like light, or an electrical current, or the water rushing through a hose.  It is dynamic and always in motion.  We abide in it when we don’t block it but let it flow into and through us, into the world.  We abide in it when we bear the fruit of good, loving, sharing, healing, blessing, welcoming, forgiving actions.

This obedience is not a burden or an obligation in any negative sense; it is a profound joy.  It is the joy we experience when we are most alive, most connected to others, most truly ourselves, and most full of love. Jesus comes to complete our joy by revealing God’s love to us.  It is a joy that we will give everything to receive; it is a joy that we only receive when we express it, when we give it away, when we share it with others.

Christians need to be seen in the world as people of love and joy, who receive from God whatever they ask because their desires and longings, their hopes and dreams are already fulfilled.  Jesus Christ has already given us God’s life; what else could we possibly want?  We already know the end of the story and the meaning of every life in the glorification of God.  We already know that everything is working together for good, that the whole creation and everyone in it is precious and beautiful.  We already know what we belong to God, and if we belong to God then everything belongs to us.

This doesn’t mean that we live charmed and hassle-free lives.  Jesus goes on to talk about how the disciples will bear the hatred and violence of the world.  He himself will be crucified just a few hours after he says all this.  But he is asking us to see beneath and behind that to the ultimate and basic truth of God’s love pervading everything.  Even if the surface remains torn and broken by human sinfulness, in Jesus Christ we are in touch with Reality so deep that these disturbances cannot touch it.  And this will be revealed to all in time.  It is revealed to us now, and we are entrusted with this good news to live and to share in the meantime.

IV.

I am always reminded of that hymn from the 1960’s that has the refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, yes they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”  The world will know we are Christians by our love for all.  They will know we are Christians by our love for our enemies and for those deemed unloveable.  By our love for the homeless and the guilty, the broken and the arrogant.  “For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse; and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe,” to quote another song from that era.

Jesus’ message is summed up in the final simple call to love one another with the passion, patience, humor, acceptance, courage, honesty, and affection that fills our hearts, and our world, with joy.

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